"On Rumsfeld’s watch the Pentagon’s...woes have gone from a mess to an utter shambles."

[ProSense]

December 01, 2006 — Features

Inheriting a Shambles at Defense

For Gates, Fixing Iraq is Just a Start

by Jason Vest

Bonus: Web-only sidebar

Few in Washington thought it would actually happen, but on November 8, there it was: a vaguely humbled-looking Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, finally being shown the door. As his increasingly McNamara-esque visage withdraws from the scene, all eyes turn to his nominated successor, Robert M. Gates, Texas A&M president and former George H.W. Bush CIA chief. Everyone seems acutely focused on one matter: how Gates will handle Iraq. But as critical and obvious as that issue is, it obscures an even more important reality: Iraq is really only a reflection of a larger institutional problem. On Rumsfeld’s watch the Pentagon’s perennial management and budget woes have gone from a mess to an utter shambles.

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Despite all the at-odds-with-reality praise once lavished on Rumsfeld for his supposedly brilliant management style (2002’s The Rumsfeld Way: The Leadership Wisdom of a Battle-Hardened Maverick probably won’t be meeting the test of time), nonpartisan studies and government audits have long shown Rumsfeld to be a less-than-able Pentagon steward. In 2002, for example, Bush’s own White House Office of Management and Budget initiated the President’s Management Scorecard, a sort of quarterly report card assessing the top management of 25 major federal agencies and departments.

It uses a “Stoplight Scoring System,” with green for success, yellow for mixed results, and red for unsatisfactory. Wheeler notes that the DOD’s columns are more often defined by red and yellow than green. “The last time I checked, DOD ranked 24 out of 25—hardly a ringing endorsement,” Wheeler says.

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Though the GAO organizes its reports by subject matter and agency, it also pinpoints “High Risk” areas, which it defines as activities with “greater vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement.” In this area, Wheeler notes, “Rumsfeld’s DOD has earned itself more GAO High Risk reports on failed management than any other federal agency.”

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Given what Walker’s investigators have found in recent years, that shouldn’t come as a shock. The sundry Iraq-related excesses (price-gouging, abuse of no-bid contracts, botched and incomplete projects) around Halliburton and other large contractors are now well known—but just as much money in aggregate gets flushed down the DOD toilet at home in all manner of smaller, sub-rosa ways. For example, the Pentagon actually has joint responsibility with the Treasury for collecting the unpaid taxes of defense contractors. As Walker noted two years ago, “at least $100 million could be collected annually from DOD contractors through effective implementation of levy and debt collection programs.” In fairness, this wasn’t exactly a high priority for Rumsfeld’s Democratic predecessors. But it was hardly something high atop Rumsfeld’s agenda either: Between 1998 and 2004, DOD collected a mere $687,000 worth of unpaid contractor taxes. GAO has also found that tens of millions of dollars aren’t collected each year from insurance companies that do business with DOD.

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Rumsfeld also failed to show much interest when it came to purchasing weapons, and more importantly, eliminating unnecessary ones. Through the graces of the Freedom of Information Act, earlier this year the Washington Post received the complete transcript of an interview between Rumsfeld and two Pentagon investigators probing the corrupt Boeing tanker-lease deal. (The worst defense procurement scandal in recent history, the investigation ended with a top DOD official and a senior Boeing executive going to prison.) As the Post pointedly noted, the transcript said “a lot about how little of Rumsfeld’s attention has been focused on weapons-buying—a function that consumes nearly a fifth of the $410 billion defense budget, exclusive of expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

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[nam78_two]

1. K&R/nt

[appleannie1]

2. "You

have done a heckofa job Rummy"

[calimary]

3. The fish rots from the head.

I hate to be a repetitive harpy about this, but oh, hell, I'm gonna go ahead and be one.

Granted, the adage - "the fish rots from the head" is inaccurate, I understand. But it still sounds good, AND most relevant.

We need to remember one really important thing about rummy and his incompetence and mismanagement and arrogance - AND EVERYBODY ELSE OF THAT ILK THAT HAS BLIGHTED OUR GOVERNMENT:

NOT ONE OF THEM would be in place to do the damage they've done, and to exhibit the incompetence and recklessness and arrogance they've exhibited - without having been chosen, appointed, and installed there - by george w. bush.

You think for one instant that Al Gore would have appointed a miscreant like rumsfeld to head HIS Department of Defense??? Granted, Lieberman would be where cheney is, but even that's HUGELY preferable to the ASSHOLE we have in there now.

All roads lead to bush. rummy got where he is because of bush. Yes, maybe cheney recommended him. But cheney wouldn't be there, either, if it weren't for bush. It all comes down to bush. And if we get rid of rummy but the next guy is installed - to carry out the same dick-ass policies (set by - um - gee - I dunno) as before, then removing rummy is just window-dressing, and WON'T get to the meat of the problem. The problem is the wanna-be king.

To remove rummy is merely to change the middleman. It doesn't address the core problem. Nor he who's the direct cause of that problem. It's a small start, but it does little to improve things, especially if the schmuck rummy reports to and from whom rummy's gotten his marching orders is unwilling, himself, to change.